NAVY: Bridge to the Orient

On a tiny Pacific island huddled within the circumference of a broken coral ring, a detachment of white-clad U.S. sailors last week went through a time-honored ceremony. The bugles blared “To the Colors,” the flag was run up, the watch posted. The Navy’s new station on the Midway Islands, first pier in the tenuous 5,860-mile water bridge between Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, was in com mission.

Skipper of Midway was no rear admiral but a Navy commander. But itsimportance to the U.S. was far out of proportion to the three stripes on its commander’s shoulder boards. From Midway’s dredged-out central lagoon (landing place for Pan Am Clippers) the largest Navy seaplane tenders can mother a fleet of patrol bombers, ranging as far north as Alaska’s Aleutian chain, south to Pago Pago, west to the edges of Japan itself.

Into Midway’s narrow channel U.S. submarines and light craft can slip for refueling and minor repairs.

Midway’s commissioning was a reminder to the U.S. public that the Navy has worked fast & furiously at its bases be yond Hawaii since it got the wherewithal from a grudging Congress. Next week there will be a brief pause in the clatter of work on two other outposts — Johnston and Palmyra Islands. The ceremony will be repeated again and two of the Navy’s flying lieutenants will take over as C.O.s.

These aircraft stations will buttress the reconnaissance and bombing powers of the Pacific Fleet on the long reach south from Pearl Harbor to the Navy’s long-neglected station on Samoa. There, in the storied harbor of Pago Pago, workmen are also busy building a first-rate aircraft station, a secondary station for water craft to bridge the long reach between Pearl Harbor and Australian bases.

But Navy men keep their most anxious eye on the water bridge east through Mid way. Beyond Wake, the bridge passes through the Japanese mandated islands. Since the early ’30s Japan has worked hard building up air bases in this cluster of hundreds of islands and her other pin points of land in the Pacific. On Yap, on Palau, on more other islands than Navymen like to think about, she has stored fuel, erected air and submarine bases, may even have established bases for light surface craft.

Beyond Wake lies the next pier in the Pacific bridge — Guam, which Congress long refused to fortify for fear of offending Japan. Today Guam less than 1,500 miles from Japan, is being outfitted as another of the U.S.’s intermediate Pacific air stations, and an advanced Fleet base to boot.

For $200,000,000 it could have been built into a fortified fleet base second only to the mighty fortress of Pearl Harbor. But the job would take two or three years; today it is too late. The Navy will have to do its best with the time it still has.

Yet the Navy is fairly well off with the Pacific defense now building. The radii of its patrol planes overlap from Alaska’s Dutch Harbor to Samoa’s Pago Pago, from Pearl Harbor to Manila. The Navy can cover the Pacific against any surprise attack. Once its reconnaissance pilots have located the enemy, the job is up to the bombers, and to the Pacific and Asiatic Fleets, which are now spread from Hawaii to Manila in a pattern that no Navy man will reveal.